As rapid developments in online learning shake up higher education, students face a dizzying array of course, degree and certification options with little sense of which path will lead to a job.

Now, efforts are under way to fill that void and offer some structure to an otherwise difficult-to-navigate and fast-growing market.
Apollo Education Group
Inc.,
best known for its University of Phoenix for-profit college, is expected to launch an "online marketplace" dubbed Balloon on Tuesday. It will start with a catalogue of nearly 15,000 technology classes from big-name course providers including
Microsoft
Corp.
,
Adobe Systems
Inc.,
Coursera and Udacity, and explicitly link them to job opportunities.

"We are associating two groups of data that typically don't meet," said
Rob Wrubel,
Balloon's founder and president of Apollo's innovation arm, Apollo Lightspeed LLC. Apollo declined to say how much money it has invested in the initiative.

Users, who can access the platform for free, will be able to search for skills that are coveted by employers, what courses teach those lessons and who is actually hiring, according to Mr. Wrubel. Course providers don't pay to be included on the site, but benefit from the broad exposure to prospective students, he says.

Apollo has been looking for new revenue streams to minimize its reliance on its University of Phoenix operation, which has struggled with weak enrollments amid regulatory scrutiny and student concerns about debt and job prospects.

Supporters see Balloon as a much-needed aggregator of online courses, akin to Amazon.com or iTunes. Other competitors are vying for the same space, so the pressure is on to provide the clearest connections between skills, instruction and employment.

"The demand [for skilled workers] is not being met," said
Jamie Merisotis,
president and chief executive of Lumina Foundation, a private foundation focused on postsecondary education, with no relationship to Balloon. "This aims to make a better connection in terms of content and delivery in the learning side and what those tech-sector players are saying they need."

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There are a growing number of related ventures that present users with more choice in the market for online learning. Degreed, which launched in January 2013, aims to track and measure all types of learning, such as degrees, conferences and magazine subscriptions, and create one score, similar to a credit score.

"We want to measure everything you learn, not just your formal schooling," said
David Blake,
Degreed's cofounder and chief executive. The free service aims to ultimately link with employers looking for viable staff and help companies ascertain their employees' skills sets, he said.

Another service, called Accredible, allows users to post examples of their skills in one central database—so employers can hear a person speaking Spanish, for instance, or see an example of a person's work even if they don't have a degree in that subject. It plans to earn revenue from companies seeking qualified new hires and through advertising course listings.

"We will find ways to make it easier so that people besides those in good economic situations can create [the needed] skillsets" for successful employment, said Mark Protus, the director of learning platforms at Microsoft, which has partnered with both Balloon and Degreed by linking their own course offerings with the new platforms.

Traditional schools say they will continue to play an important role in preparing students for careers, even as online efforts to provide training and certify skills take off.

Cathy Sandeen,
vice president for education attainment and innovation at the American Council on Education, a nonprofit higher education association, said these innovations are a healthy addition to the industry, but she doesn't view them as substitutes to degrees. "It's happening a little bit separately from higher education, and right now it's more focused on the employment side," she said.

Jon Santangelo,
a 28-year-old corporate recruiter and consultant in Beijing, majored in marketing in college but said he has already seen his skills grow stale. He said that when he went online to find an inexpensive, convenient option to brush up on social networks and search-engine optimization, he found plenty of prospects—too many.

"There's so many courses," he said, adding that he didn't know how to determine which classes were of high quality or relevant to the fast-changing sector.

Mr. Santangelo turned to SkilledUp.com, a website that aggregates more than 112,000 skills-based courses from upwards of 340 providers, to zero in on free or low-cost classes taught by current practitioners. "If the learning is coming from people who are currently in the field, I feel like I'm getting every penny of my money's worth," he said. He is currently assessing a few finalists and plans to pick a class soon.

Balloon said it is limiting itself to jobs in technology to start, but plans to expand later into subjects like energy, health care and manufacturing. Like other ventures in the field, Balloon caters mostly to working adults.

At first, a pool of experts from partner companies will update the system with fresh information about in-demand expertise. Over time, Mr. Wrubel envisions users rating the courses themselves, something akin to restaurant ratings online.

"No one knows how to distinguish any of it," he said, referring to the current glut of online course offerings. Balloon found 50,000 options just for tech skills, ranging from hours to months, and while many are free, some boot camps top $10,000.

Though Balloon isn't promising employment, Mr. Wrubel said it makes "tacit connections" between individual classes and jobs. He expects that once the site is up and running, employers would be willing to pay for leads on successful students who could fill job openings. In the most in-demand sectors, companies regularly pay tens of thousands of dollars to recruiters for each hire, and he said Balloon would charge less.

EMC can reach a broader audience with Balloon than if it just stuck to pitching courses to customer companies, said
Tom Clancy,
vice president of EMC Education Services.

Though Balloon could offer new leads for prospective hires, he said that EMC likely won't extend job offers to students just because they completed a recommended course sequence. "We value a degree," he said.

It has always been about quality. Where on-line offerings beat traditional on-ground options, the Internet wins every time. When high quality is delivered with convenience and at a lower price, a powerful competitive advantage will quickly destroy the competition. We are headed to a time when 50% of for-credit coursework will be taken on-line - surpassed even sooner by all on-line learning Vs. more traditional training and education vehicles. Not many centers of learning will survive delivering only face-to-face programs.

The idea that you need a class to learn social media and SEO is puzzling to me. You learn by doing. That's the only way to separate the wheat from the chaff in SEO, because there are so many phony-baloney practitioners out there who are happy to take your money and show you fake results.

Build a website. Fill it with content. Consult some of the good basic reputable books on SEO. Peter Kent's Search Engine Optimization for Dummies is a classic, updated periodically.

Then figure out how to promote your site using social media. No class is going to be able to teach you this because every site and entrepreneur is different -- no one-size-fits-all solution.

I guarantee a prospective employer will be far more impressed by a high-ranking profitable website than they will be by a class certification. And if they're not, I wouldn't want to work for them.

The last time I looked into job training for software developers, I found most of the providers in my area wanted to offer expensive programs rather than classes that address specific skill sets. I have not looked into Balloon or SkilledUp too deeply yet, but if they offer individual courses I'd recommend my employer give them a try.

Development methodologies change so frequently, I don't trust a 6 month or year long program to change dynamically enough to fit the specific needs of a business.

I also think that one-on-one attention is critical. It's what differentiates taking a course from learning individually. They would need to offer a lot of individual attention for it to be worth it, imo.

In general the online education is a corrupt business. Hundreds of so called universities are hawking their shoddy wares online. Their core interest is to keep you enrolling in useless classes as long as you have the money. Once you run out of money, they encourage you to borrow more from the government, your employer or your parents and friends. If you are late in your payments, they throw you out without any remorse, and you end up in debt to the loaner forever. They are in for the profit and you must be aware of it. Be very careful of their sales pitch and promises of employment after the completion of the program. They hire professional recruiters on commission, just like used car salespersons. Those promises are never kept. They care less if you get any employment after the course work is completed. There is little accountability, because, the business is not transparent. You must do your research before you enroll and spend the hard earned money.

David - you're right that "training" courses for software developers can become obsolete quickly. There's an important difference between training and education, though.

The corporate mindset that wants a highly specialized skill set for a short period of time to work on a specific project is usually counterproductive. Some software development managers have networks of engineers from which they can cherry pick specific skills if the timing is right, but the timing often isn't right.

Education is a better long term approach than training. The short term corporate mentality that always looks outside for a solution to an immediate problem is what needs to change.

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